I tell C no one loves me like a mother would. / C says no one loves a fragile queer. I choke / on the thread as it slices words out:/ Say Ma say Mother America say Mother India say love me like a mother won’t.

Events

How does history – particularly the history of war, colonialism, and marginalization – impact the work of Asian American poets across time and space? How does language act as a haunting space of intervention and activism? Poet and scholar Jane Wong raised these questions with her digital multimedia project, The Poetics of Haunting. For the last workshop event of 2017, Wong and poets Carlina Duan, ChristineShan Shan Hou, and Muriel Leung read work and share images that boldly invoke historical and familial ghosts so that we may feel their presence.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Carlina Duan’s debut collection of poetry I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017) wrestles with the growing pains of Chinese American girlhood and racial consciousness. Franny Choi writes, “In I Wore My Blackest Hair, [Duan’s] speaker navigates diaspora and its incumbent losses — of family, of language, of face — with unflinching care, revealing complex textures and concrete magic.” Carlina is a 2016 Fulbright grant recipient and an MFA Candidate at Vanderbilt University. Her work has been published in Uncommon Core, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. Check out her poems about her father, silence, and the echo of “Who Let the Dogs Out” on a schoolbus in The Margins.
A garden, an intimate and intense look at being a lonely girl, and a shape-shifting feminist spiritual quest of imagined histories, Christine Shan Shan Hou’s Community Garden for Lonely Girls (Gramma Press, 2017) creates strange and mutable new generational mythologies. The Poetry Project writes, “Community Garden for Lonely Girls invites readers of all gender persuasions to momentarily suspend the Enlightenment imperative to cultivate their individual plots and embrace the feeling of being disposable — and disposed into — a mass flowerpot.” Work from Community Garden for Lonely Girls appears in Jane Wong’s Poetics of Haunting Digital Project: “We talk over each other all the time. We exchange ghosts in the details.” Christine is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her previous publications include “I'm Sunlight” (The Song Cave 2016), C O N C R E T E S O U N D (2011) a collaborative artists’ book with artist Audra Wolowiec, and Accumulations (Publication Studio 2010).
Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti (Noemi Press, 2016) is an arresting account of loss and the unresolved nature of mourning and making art. Publisher’s Weekly calls it, “an elegant, elegiac debut collection set in a haunted and highly ritualized space.” Cathy Park Hong writes, “Leung’s poems can be unbearably intimate yet also epic, traversing into the speculative and gothic, as she animates her grief into a macabre and exquisitely haunted underworld…”; Hyperallergic writes “She meets the violence of her grief with poems populated by holograms, robots, and ghosts.” A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a contributing editor to the Bettering American Poetry anthology and is also Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Southern California. She is from Queens, NY.
Jane Wong is a poet, scholar and the creator of the Poetics of Haunting digital project. Inspired by her scholarly manuscript on the of ghosts in contemporary Asian American poetry, Going Toward the Ghost, the project grew into a TED Talk, a digital collection of haunting poems, a record of with conversations with Bhanu Kapil and Sally Wen Mao, and a piece written in conversation with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s archive. Of her powerful debut poetry collection, Overpour (Action Books, 2016) Full Stop writes, “There isn’t [a page] without arresting imagery and a suggestion of forceful, generative life.” A former Kundiman and Fulbright Fellow, Wong is an Assistant Professor at Western Washington University. Check out her poem from Overpour, “Pastoral Power” and her conversation with Sally Wen Mao about the book in The Margins.
NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.
This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.
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A special discussion about music and the ghosts of America’s racial past featuring two highly acclaimed authors. A murder mystery, a ghost story, and two cultural tourists collide in Hari Kunzru’s spellbinding novel White Tears (Knopf, 2017), which connects contemporary cultural appropriation and white hawkers of black music with the history of racism and the forgotten geniuses of American music and Delta Mississippi Blues. Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Margo Jefferson’s classic work of cultural criticism, On Michael Jackson (Pantheon, 2005), a complex and tender portrait of the King of Pop, reckons with child stardom and the specter of racial ghosts that shaped his celebrity. She’ll read from her evolving work on Michael Jackson and current writing on jazz singers. Moderated by Kevin Nguyen, editor at GQ.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Seth and Carter, two young music-obsessed culture vultures, find themselves thrust into a murder mystery involving the ghost of a blues musician that takes Seth to Mississippi, unraveling the depth of the history of racism and exploitation in music. The New York Times writes, “White Tears is distinguished by a knowledge of blues at its deepest, a gift for observation at its most penetrating and stretches of plain old marvelous writing.” Slate raves, “Call it a ghost story or a rumination on art, possession and responsibility—or both—it has all the force of a truth that can be neither denied nor buried—at least not for long.” Hari Kunzru is the author of four previous novels: The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, and Gods Without Men. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin. Check out his piece written in response to F.N. Souza’s painting “Degenerates” in The Margins.
The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica. Her memoir, Negroland, received the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She is also the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Kevin Nguyen is an editor at GQ Magazine, where he writes about books, music and popular media. White Tears is his favorite book he read in 2017 “by a mile,” calling it a “tremendous, smart, weird book.” Kevin was formerly a book reviewer for Grantland, and has published in The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and The Millions.
This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.
NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.
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One Session, 90 minutes (3:30PM-4:00PM)
Saturday, January 27th, 2018
Fees & Payment Options: $25
Full payment due before first class.
REGISTER HEREWhy You Should Take This Class: Everyone has a unique story waiting to be unearthed. Like diamonds under a bedrock, you need the right tools in order to extract and polish them. Join Christina Chiu for a 90-minute workshop that will guide entrepreneurs, writers, professionals, and everyone in-between through a metaphorical mining excursion to discover their unique story. Participate in various writing exercises, receive helpful feedback, and synthesize the “gems” of your discoveries into something much more.
Class Description: In this workshop, we will discuss how to craft a manuscript for publication, how to pitch your work to agents and editors, and how to maintain writing momentum on your own and overcoming writers’ block.
Questions? Contact Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org.
Christina Chiu is an author, creative writing coach, and public speaker whose core message of Transcendence is inspired by her Chinese-American heritage. She is the author of Troublemaker and Other Saints (Berkley, 2002), and is a winner of the Asian American Literary Award. Troublemaker was the Alternate Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and was nominated for the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award. Christina also won literary awards from the Playboy Fiction Contest, Glimmer Train, New Millenium, New York Stories, World Wide Writers, Explorations, New Stone Circle Fiction Contest, and El Dorado Writers’ Guild. Christina is the recipient of the Robert Simpson Fellowship, the Van Lier Fellowship, the Wiepersdorf Fellowship in Germany, and the Claire Woolrich Scholarship from Columbia University. This December, Christina will be a fellow at Moulin a Nef in Auvillar, France...